


Carrion

by Fluffyllama (Llama)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, Restraints
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:00:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llama/pseuds/Fluffyllama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“…they’ve found Igor Karkaroff’s body in a shack up north.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carrion

**Author's Note:**

> Written for appleviking’s request for Merry Smutmas 2005.

If there’s one reason above all that Severus Snape hates the house at Spinner’s End, it’s the birds.

He has nothing against avian species on general principle. Owls are useful creatures with a modicum of intelligence, and while Albus’s love of his unbearably Gryffindorish pet borders on the dangerously obsessive, Severus can admit it’s more useful than most.

Spinner’s End, however, harbours a population of sleek black birds that he has never seen elsewhere, not even among Hogwarts’ diverse bird population. They’re too large for rooks, too neat for crows, and he’s never been able to find a satisfactory name for them.

Perhaps it is that which annoys him the most.

* * *

“We cannot allow him in here again, dear boy,” Albus says, as if Severus is asking to keep the rat as a pet. “You will have to find alternative living arrangements for the summer.”

It’s too blithe, too quick to be without some subterfuge, and Severus knows there’s more to the decision than his problems. He’s never been foolish enough to think he knows every iron Albus has in the fire, or that his shackles won’t chafe on occasion, however much he begged for them.

After so many years, Hogwarts’ dungeons are a home, not a prison. The thick walls kept the outside world at bay for years, until Potter started blowing clumsy holes in them, inviting the chill wind of change back into the castle’s chambers and corridors. Severus knows it’s only figurative for now, but the first day he saw the boy in his class he knew they were all just ash and rubble in the making.

There’s not much time left, if even Albus is crumbling.

* * *

The master bedroom is passable after a few sweeps of his wand, the plaster dust and cobwebs all spirited away into the ether. There’s no _Scourgify_ for his memories, where there will always be a dark stain on the carpet just _there_ , and long scratches marring the paintwork inside the cupboard, but he can place a chair over that damned spot, and keep the cupboard doors tightly locked.

It’s disconcerting how the floorboards protest under his feet, and how thin the wallpapered shell is between inside and out, between this room and the next where his unwelcome guest mumbles to himself like a deranged house-elf. The scale is all wrong, too — he can travel from the door to the foot of the bed in barely more than one stride, yet he can see miles across the grimy landscape from the window.

On the tumbledown wall between house and darkening street is a silent row of black, beady-eyed shadows.

“Pettigrew,” he snaps, and the rat comes scurrying. “You’re in here.”

It’s a weakness he will probably regret, because Severus can see those watery eyes gleam for a second before Pettigrew scuttles back out for his half-unpacked bags.

“Very hospitable, Severus,” he simpers, and Severus turns sharply as a claw-like hand reaches for the cupboard door.

As he leaves, the key turns with a sickening slide.

* * *

The letter arrives on a day too grey to be summer.

Severus has almost forgotten what receiving post the normal way is like. Neither Albus nor the Dark Lord deign to write their instructions down like mere mortals, not when they can rip Severus’s nerves to shreds with their subterfuges.

He’s not even sure what it is at first; it’s not an owl, that’s for certain. It’s a grey, bedraggled creature, one which is lucky to make it over the wall without losing more than a couple of feathers to his unwanted line of sentries. It stands, tiny chest heaving, while he removes the letter from its leg, and barely has the energy to peck at the stale owl treat Severus digs up from the bureau.

“Suit yourself.” Severus grimaces at the desperate scrawl that slants across the rough paper, and slides his eyes away.

Pettigrew is watching with some incredulity and more curiosity than is good for either of them. _Any_ of them. “A pigeon?”

“Apparently,” is all Severus says, because Pettigrew is sidling closer to both message and messenger. He folds the letter, slips it back into the envelope, and shoos the pigeon towards the window. There’s a slight ruffling of feathers, a line of settling black shapes against the last glow of sunset. Maybe they rise from their perch as he turns back to the bureau.

Then again, it could just be a trick of the light.

* * *

Pettigrew can’t keep still for a moment, no matter how many times Severus snaps at him. His clumsy, shuffling shape takes up too much space in this cramped house; even more when he lights the fire and reflected flames pounce on the rows of books and papers. Then his shadow seems to loom over every chair in a way this house hasn’t seen in almost two decades.

 _“Are you listening to me?”_

The chair by the window. Too distracting with the sound of distant voices and claws scrabbling on stone. His fingers are dry against the coarse envelope, but it remains in his pocket.

 _“Are you listening— goddamnit woman, out of the way!”_

The seat at the bureau. It still doesn’t feel like his space, however many potions texts he piles up there.

 _“Are you listening to me, boy?”_

The armchair by the fire. The perfect place to sit and read, if one was alone.

 _Books again!”_

The roar tears through his skull, but it’s the fleeting glimpse of his mother’s face through the kitchen door that has Severus’s attention still. It doesn’t go unnoticed, not if those thin, sneering lips are anything to go by.

“You’re no son of mine, sitting there with your nose in a book all day long.” It would be funny, sitting there looking up at his own profile, if he could remember how to laugh at such absurdities. It would be funny if he hadn’t had a good beating from the thick leather strap hanging by the fireplace last time he’d remembered how.

It would be funny if he could do anything right in this situation. But of course, he can’t.

“What’s this? More of that filthy magic?”

“No, it’s just—” But the book’s gone from his hands before he can get the lie out or even uncurl his legs — the fire leaps and flares, and that’s another borrowed dust jacket up in flames, and another ten sickles he owes the library.

A loose floorboard under his bed hides, among other things, four more textbooks and a jar with sixteen sickles and a single knut. The first of September is still weeks away, but if he stays in his room for the rest of the holidays, maybe it will be enough.

Another shadow passes over Severus’s shoulder, and parchment crackles against his chest.

“I’m going up,” he announces abruptly to a startled Pettigrew, and is gone.

* * *

It takes two pillows (feather, and starting to scatter dust) to make him comfortable against the narrow iron bedstead nowadays. His legs take more effort to bend into position, too, and they look oddly fragile against the faded bedspread. When he pulls the letter out once more, so do his hands; the skin shines almost transparent in the harsh light of the bare bulb.

 _I need to see you, urgently. Meet me at the old Cruikshank place tonight._

No signature, but it doesn’t need one.

If Severus was the sentimental type, had _ever_ been the sentimental type, he might have dozens of similar notes hidden away, along with ticket stubs, locks of hair, and perhaps even the odd photo of a dark-haired man of indeterminate middle years with a deceptively friendly arm draped around a teenage boy. Most of the notes would be in a neat, if hurried hand; some perhaps, later ones, might betray a certain impatience or eagerness in the underlining of ‘urgently’ or ‘tonight’; some still later might even hint at the tremors of anticipation shivering through the hand that held the quill to the parchment.

None would have held half the urgency of the same words scrawled across this hastily ripped-out page.

* * *

 _“What if I couldn’t get away?” Severus shivers under the hands pushing up his robes. As always, they are cold enough for winter where they brush against his skin._

“I would wait, of course.” Karkaroff doesn’t smile when he says it, but Severus still wants to believe it’s true. After all, there are plenty of other boys out there for someone like Karkaroff if he decides it’s too much trouble to work around Severus’s situation.

“It’s difficult, when I’m at home.”

Karkaroff just grunts and spits into his palm.

“You don’t know what it’s like… how he watches me.”

“I will be quick,” is all he says, and that’s really not the point, especially when his hand is as rough and careless as it is today, coarse as sandpaper where it rasps over and over the sensitive tip of Severus’s cock.

Severus bites his lip and pushes the hand down, because the only way he’s going to get off today is if Karkaroff is satisfied quickly and lets him handle the rest himself.

“Fuck me,” he says, and it’s just too bad if Karkaroff gets the wrong idea because this is the third time he’s asked for this recently. “I need you to fuck me now.”

He doesn’t want to think about why it’s so easy to let need creep into his voice, or why the words send a little tremble through him even before Karkaroff chuckles into his shoulder.

“Impatient these days, aren’t you?” Karkaroff pulls back and gives him an appraising look. “What else?”

“What?”

“What else do you want?” Karkaroff’s face breaks into a half-smirk, half-leer. “Perhaps you have been a bad boy, hmm?”

The sharp slap to his backside echoes through the shack, and Severus could swear the corrugated iron roof actually vibrates above them.

“No.” Karkaroff frowns in disappointment, but there are some games Severus won’t play. Instead he reaches out with his skinny arms and pushes at Karkaroff’s chest. Yes, there’s the fire sparking again in those dark eyes already at the promise of a struggle. “I think,” Severus says coldly, deliberately. “I think I should leave now.”

* * *

There is, of course, no way he can go.

Pettigrew has already seen too much, and the Dark Lord’s whims mean the snivelling wretch could be back in favour tomorrow… well, perhaps not tomorrow, but it pays to be careful. And while the previous incarnation of Lord Voldemort could accelerate from cold caress to _Crucio_ in the blink of an eye, the current one has dispensed with both waiting _and_ blinking.

 _“What if I couldn’t get away?”_

Sending a reply would be suicide, murder, or both. Flooing is out of the question. Apparition is monitored by all factions, probably even a few he doesn’t know about. There are quaint little Order of the Phoenix clones popping up all over the place these days, if rumours are to be believed.

No, if he was going, he would have to walk. But he’s not going.

 _“What if I couldn’t get away?”_

“I would wait, of course.”

He won’t. He never would have, and he won’t now. Severus doesn’t need to tramp over miles of countryside in the darkness to prove it – he knows it and always has.

And even if he did wait, what would it prove except that Severus was the only place he had left to turn?

 _“I would wait.”_

Severus tries to think of another option, but really, there are none.

* * *

If possible, the roof has sagged even lower in the old farmhouse, and it looks like many a wall across the moors has gained second-hand stones from the crumbled kitchen over the years. Moonlight splinters through the makeshift barricades covering the holes, just enough to illuminate the tracks of long-dripped water down old plaster, and the filthy sheets on a bed supported by bricks and rubble.

The house is still in better shape than Karkaroff.

“You can’t leave me here,” he repeats, over and over, no matter what Severus says.

“I have no choice,” Severus tells him, but Karkaroff reaches for him, eyes wild and fingers too crooked for his age. “If you would take Dumbledore’s offer of—”

“No!” Karkaroff is all blind panic, groping for Severus’s hands. His skin is dry, his fingers sharp, and they press into Severus’s bones with a grip so tight he can almost feel them crack under the pressure. “Don’t play your games with me, Severus, this is—”

“No games,” Severus gasps, but Karkaroff is pressed against him now, pushing him towards the wall and sending him stumbling over uneven stones that might once have been a hearth.

“You always liked your games, Severus.”

 _He_ liked his games?

“They were good times we had, were they not?”

No, he wants to say. They were not good times. You took an innocent, lonely boy, and you turned him into… this.

It’s easier to blame someone else, every time. It’s hard to remember this is a man who was younger than Severus is now when they last met here. The years have not been kind to either of them.

“Such a passionate, _dangerous_ child.”

There might be madness in that gaze, but there’s also a momentary softness in the voice, and an awkward, unfamiliar caress across his palm from the emaciated fingers that hold him still.

Perhaps that’s why he lets himself go limp against the wall. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t resist on those few, faltering steps across the room to the bed, why he rests his cheek willingly against the grimy pillow. Perhaps it’s why, when Karkaroff fumbles the spell, swearing under his breath, he mutters the words they need.

“What do you want?”

Severus tests his bonds; apparently two can cast it as well as one. The rope bites into his wrists as it never used to, but it’s not as if that matters.

“Fuck me,” he says, the words so rusty from lack of use that it seems impossible he has ever uttered them before. They still have as much magic as the binding spell though, if the sharp intake of breath above him is anything to go by.

Or should that be as much as an _Avada Kedavra_?

“Fuck me,” he says again, more clearly this time, and hopes it hasn’t been _too_ long.

* * *

 _Karkaroff fucks like he talks._

“Good boy,” he croons in that rich voice when he’s easing his way in, slippery fingers giving way to slippery cock. “Let me in, that’s a good— oh, yes.”

And he’s there, through the resisting muscle, and opening Severus up further with every push, every thrust, every grunt. “So tight,” he groans, and “Going to fill you up, little one”. Severus can only wriggle to ease the inevitable pain, and strain against the bonds at his wrists now, because Karkaroff’s not going to stop until he’s buried deep inside, Severus knows that.

He also knows that when he is — when the slow, relentless thrust inside stops, and they are both still for a moment — then, everything will change.

* * *

It’s still there, that moment.

All these years, the deaths, the betrayals, and right at this moment Severus could be fifteen, sixteen, seventeen again. A moment of clarity; of sheer, pure bliss. Both beginning and ending, no further to go on the road, trying to hold on as long as possible before the inevitable give and take, pleasure and pain. Just the same motions to repeat over and over, trying to achieve the same high again, but finding only different ones.

It doesn’t last long. It never did.

* * *

 _There’s pleasure to be found between the rough use of his body and the coarseness of the blanket underneath rubbing him raw, and Severus rides the edge of it for as long as he can. Somehow, whether by coincidence or design, Karkaroff always seems to know when he’s close, when the press and release of weight on his back and thighs squeezing his cock against the bed has brought him to the brink._

Every time, he yanks Severus’s hips up from the bed in the nick of time, thrusting harder and deeper, as if to ensure it’s only his cock, or his hand, that makes Severus come. Every time, he says “Come for me” in that deep voice, as if even Severus’s orgasm belongs to him.

Every time, without fail, Severus comes on command.

* * *

“You mustn’t stay here any longer,” Severus says when he has loosened his bonds and regained the power of speech.

Karkaroff says nothing for a moment, and whether it’s stubbornness or exhaustion that keeps him silent, Severus knows he won’t be running any further.

When he does speak, his voice is almost too low to hear.

* * *

 _“You will be the death of me.”_

The phrase has never impressed Severus, even with the melodramatic flair lent to it by Karkaroff’s accent. He’s been aware of the man’s reputation for too long; ever since he crept around the Slytherin common room as a first year to hear Lucius Malfoy hold forth about his family’s social circle. The very idea of Severus being dangerous to him is just the man’s odd fantasy, that much he is sure of — what threat could he be to a Death Eater, after all?

“I have to go soon,” he says when Karkaroff rolls off him to search for one of his funny little cigars.

Karkaroff just grunts through a puff of foul-smelling smoke.

“But I wanted to ask… what we talked about last time?”

“You’re too young.” Karkaroff snaps the words out sharply, but there’s no anger there, and his face is thoughtful.

Old enough for some things though, but he’s learnt not to speak so plainly. “I’m of age next birthday,” he says instead. “I don’t want to waste any time.”

Karkaroff says nothing, just blows out more smoke, closer to Severus this time.

“I know there’s a test,” he says, playing his last card. Sneaking and snooping has brought him little more than that. “I could do that.”

“Little innocent.” Karkaroff smiles, but there’s no mirth behind it. “The test is always the same.”

He knows what it is then, though whether it’s from the sneer creeping across Karkaroff’s face, or the ‘little innocent’ remark, or whether he’s always known, he’s not sure.

“So can you still do it, little one? Can you kill a man?”

Whatever he sees in Severus’s face, Karkaroff doesn’t share it with him, but if laughter can kill a man, Severus thinks he might be the death of his mentor yet.

* * *

So many things he could say, or should say, but he knows Karkaroff is beyond taking any advice really. Beyond help.

“But I didn’t give you up, Igor,” Severus whispers, straightening his robes. “Not then, and not now.”

Karkaroff doesn’t answer. Severus’s fingers hover above the pale throat, but he does not touch.

 _“Can you kill a man?”_

There are some things best left unknown.

* * *

It’s almost dawn when he reaches Spinner’s End again.

Pettigrew is dozing in front of the fire, although it is almost burned out now. His breath wheezes in and snores out, and there is drool at the corner of his mouth.

 _“Where have you been, boy?”_

He takes the stairs slowly, but turns to the master bedroom instead of his own. The cupboard door is standing open, the interior barely occupied by Pettigrew’s meagre collection of possessions.

 _“Get in there, I don’t want to see your miserable little face again today!”_

It looks too small, too cramped now.

 _“Tobias, don’t. He didn’t mean–”_

The scratches match the spread of his fingers even now, though; he couldn’t have been much smaller.

 _“Don’t you dare tell me how to discipline the boy!”_

The crack of the cupboard door just wide enough to see the sweep of a wand, the pool of red spreading across the threadbare carpet. His own protests not too loud to drown out the screamed curse, the thud of a body.

“Don’t worry, mother.”

The answer to more than one prayer.

“Nobody will ever know.”

Well, almost nobody.

* * *

It’s the work of moments to dump Pettigrew’s junk on the landing and move his own effects into the bigger room. His spare robes, house-elf starched for as long as it lasts. Books that should not be mingled with those downstairs. Also, under the loose floorboard beneath his bed, papers Pettigrew should not see.

And a box.

Dust lies thick along the lid, and he’s tempted to leave it that way, but if he’s not going to peek inside now then he may never do again.

He doesn’t linger over the photographs that wave, smile or scowl out at him, or awaken old memories with ticket stubs that proclaim ‘last chance to see’ in hoarse, creaking voices with missing letters. He simply runs his fingers over aged parchment scraps, and adds another to the sheaf.

It’s harder than he expects to seal it again and lock it inside the cupboard.

Later, he promises himself. He hasn’t even promised himself a later until now.

* * *

When Severus slams the door, Pettigrew wakes and squeals in a remarkably satisfying manner.

“S-s-everus!”

“I don’t think we will add guarding the house to your duties, Wormtail,” he sneers, “But you can start by cleaning out the kitchen.”

“D-duties?” The outrage in the rat’s squeak is music to Severus’s ears. It may be a poor pleasure to take, but if it’s all he has, take it he will.

“We must all do what we can for the cause, don’t you agree, Wormtail?”

He can get rid of the bureau later, he decides, and that leaves only one irritant left to take care of. Severus tugs the window open so viciously that he almost pulls the catch off the frame, aiming a missile out into the early sunlight.

“That’s my boot, Severus!” Pettigrew hops up and down in outrage and stockinged feet, and black birds flap and scatter from where they are gathered on the ground, leaving only a smear of dark red and a bundle of tatty grey feathers.

“You’d better fetch it then.” Severus banks up the fire and settles down with a book in the vacated chair. “And clear up that disgusting mess while you’re out there.”

The birds will be back, he knows that. It’s inevitable.

But in the meantime, he will enjoy himself as best he can.


End file.
